Control and design of multi-agent systems

Toward development of robust systems against selfish behaviors of agents

Our research interests include a wide variety of topics on analyzing and designing large-scale complex systems. Among these topics, we would like to introduce some research topics of Associate Prof. Kanazawa related to ``control and design of multi-agent systems.´´

Multi-agent systems consist of many agents who have different objectives and interact with one another. We study on control and design of multi-agent systems where totally desirable states for the whole system are always realized even if agents act selfishly so as to improve their own benefits.

For example, we consider a case where multiple users (agents) share some computational resources. Each user requests a required amount of resources, and the resources are allocated based on the requests of all users. In such a case, if some users request more resources than their true needs, some additional resources may be allocated to them and the total welfare or fairness among users may be damaged. We study on a resource allocation method which ensures the fairness among all users by imposing penalties on users who make such false requests.

We consider another case where multiple mobile sensors (agents) are deployed to monitor a certain mission area. Especially, when the mission area is very wide or there are many sensors, it is difficult for each sensor to collect information about whole mission area and all sensors. So, it is important to design the local criterion of each sensor so as to move based only on the local information which the sensor can easily collect. We study on the optimal sensor deployment method which deploys sensors according to the relative importance of each point in the mission area with obstacle avoidance. The figure shows that four sensors starting from the bottom-left area move to monitor the relatively important area (red area) avoiding the obstacles (black areas).